Not sure if they are changing the format for number 2, but though progression and loot are rather borderlandsy (less random/varied but more bespoke and I think cooler) the structure is far less open, though there was some attempts at making the open areas interesting for free-roam (Rarely successful, but I did have some good times cruising around meeting whoever).

The levels tend to be linear but wide, like the larger Halo encounters, with some kind of boss action and some wave based encounters strewn throughout. The missions re-use areas, but often start in different parts and end in more unique mission specific areas that are closed off other times.

There were also some cool raids and some other stuff. It's mostly 3 player co-op. Shooting feels Halo awesome and weapon feel even more sublime considering the variety of weapons. Some of the unique were super fun to earn and use. The raids were 6 player and more mission types supporting that player count would be nice now that they have dropped PS3/360 support.

Why would there be hype over a casual consolized as fuck garbage FPS sequel, the first part of which never made it to PC? They can fuck right off with this crap is what they can.

Wow you REALLY don't like this kind of shooter do you? Actually even with all it's flaws and tuning for controller, I would hold it up against most PC FPS games modern and old.

Good art direction and attention to detail with weapon and movement tuning does not seem overly common on any platform these days. I feel like enemy AI/reactivity suffers a little compared to their older games due to the online-ness but the lag tolerance is much better than the older games and probably makes up for it.

No it's not the disembodied gun floating in space, spinning 360 degrees in 0.1 seconds and railgunning someone in the face kind of shooter, but we have heaps of them already and I find them kind of boring now in any case.

Bad Bungie has and will continue to earn more money off of me than most devs on a good day, and I will probably follow them to whatever platform they decide to go to town on. Luckily, for the first time since Myth:The Fallen Lords, they are coming to me!

Awesome. I haven't gotten the premium yet, and now I don't have to! Good value considering the hundred odd hours I've spent on this game, but there are always other, newer or more alcoholic things I can buy with the not insubstantial asking price.

Lack of progression is sad but at least I can play the maps with the old man. Great game.

Bundy wrote on Mar 25, 2017, 15:49:Thought I would be really into this game but I was disappointed. I thought it was supposed to be an island of puzzles. But it was just hundreds of the exact same puzzle, the island was basically just background. Would have been better if the environment was the puzzles

I had the same issue. It was just different variations of the same puzzle. And most the time, it wasn't trying to figure out the puzzle that took the longest, but the exact rules of what the new variation was.

Even that wouldn't have bothered me so much if there weren't SO many puzzles. Literally to open one part of a path, of which there were about 8 different things to open, each section was like 10 puzzles long. It was honestly boring me to death trying to play it.

I got stuck on the sound section, but I loved this game and the game seems to go out of it's way to teach you the puzzles. The reason there are so many as that almost every puzzle in the game is a tutorial for another set of puzzles. Maybe it didn't ramp up fast enough for you but they can get really tricky after the first few areas, and very satisfying for my age and booze addled brain to work out.

The game doesn't prevent you from playing them out of order either for the most part, but usually you know that by the fact you have no idea whats going on.

And though the maze puzzles are the only puzzles, they get embedded in and interact with the environment in surprising ways. The totems scattered around the island track and give clues to the environment puzzles nearby. One of the guys from Giantbomb even finished the game without realising the other half of the game was right in front of him the whole time.

One of the best games I've ever played. Very unique and polished. Now mac snobs can play as well!

I think it's an amazing looking game as well, way up there. I'm definitely excited for D2. I've been on the Bungie bandwagon since Myth and I think their attention to detail has been astounding in almost every release.

What Destiny lacked in PC grunt/technical prowess it made up with in art design, like older Blizzard games. It needed to run on X360 and PS3 remember, and apparently did it very well.

Although there is a lot of terrain in that game you replay it all again and again forever, so the art design and the fact that it feels amazing (unless you are allergic to a controller based FPS like most of you guys here) is what has kept it's fanbase mostly intact despite never getting close to matching the promise of it's art and marketing.

Awesome. I need to get back into this. I wish I had the patience to mod and find a group, and I'm a little nonplussed by the near future setting and co-op campaign in the last release, but happy the platform continues to get some love. Malden DLC sounds awesome so fingers crossed.

I think I enjoyed it a lot more than 3 though it was a far more conservative design. The 4p Co-op in GoW3 watered down some of the narrative (don't mock me!) and encounter design strengths of the first 2 games. 4 is tight, a top tier linear 3rd person cover shooter with an awesome windows port. Cliff might have taken more risks with it but not sure if it would have been a better game with Epic.

Need to wake up early tomorrow to play some Horde with the lads in Europe. At least the netcode can manage that without issue so it gets my thumbs up just for that.

Task wrote on Mar 17, 2017, 04:41:Maybe in a while when it's fully "expansioned" and modded?

It's weird, it actually has most the mechanics from V already. It just dosn't work that well, havn't touched the thing since launch. Religion, trade, espionage and a few other things felt bolted on in V and not quite right, but the game itself still felt civ-epic. At least after Gods and Kings.

This one feels a little too close to Civ-rev. I don't mind the faster games or graphical style, but some of the awesome has been streamlined out and I'm not sure how to articulate it.

I think about the only ones left are Sid Meir and Will Wright. I'll have to dig out my copy of PC Gamer's 'Game Gods' issue from the 90's and see who else was on there...like Jon Romero. I guess we can thank the heavens above we still have Derek Smart, eh?

=-Rigs-=

Warren Spector is still here and working on a new System Shock, even if his studio isnt called "Looking Glass" anymore. And to be honest some "new" names like CD Projekt Red are now up there and very much kicking ass and taking names. Out with the old, in with the new !

If we are talking LGS, would prefer a decent Underworld spiritual sequel. A good one that captures the amazing immersion of the OG game.

Cutter wrote on Mar 2, 2017, 20:21:Jesus, Paradox is the only company in the world that makes games to go with its DLC.

Do you play this, CK2 or Hearts of Iron Cutter? All were pretty well formed at release. The effort required to develop formerly abstract parts of the game into fleshed out, bespoke player experiences is worth it to most of us. Especially those savy enough to wait for the next release to get the previous for a fiver or less on special.

Darks wrote on Feb 22, 2017, 15:31:Yea, you say that up until the enemy shows up in your back yard and you cant do a damn thing about it. Its called preventive measures. Always be prepared no matter what!

Yeah, and that sort of institutional paranoia - which is common for Americans in a way they don't understand themselves - that continually allows the MIC to keep fleecing people like you. Jesus Christ, man! Eisenhower warned the American public about that very thing when he left office!

Eisenhower, who actually stared down the Soviets at what was probably their most dangerous so you would think they would have fucking listened to him.

This affects me, but I am surprised they were not charging the GST already.

Our conservatives (The same ones that bought back our guns) bought it in ages ago, and it's on almost everything. The exceptions are so complicated and numerous that it ruined whatever tax simplification benefits it might have had, but at least you then get a cut of anything the cash economy (Drugs, off the books work) spends on.

But yeah, just spent my gaming budget for the year on the dentist, so any increase will actually decrease my likelihood of buying anything. It equates to about half an hour extra work at minimum wage to afford a AA game if you lived in a vacuum/mums shed and had no other living costs.

edit to say we have just had our minimum wage Sunday penalty rates cut in half so that helps anyone busing tables to pay for their their new GST enchanced Steam Purchase.

rawbelly wrote on Feb 12, 2017, 17:25:Wanted the combat to feel like Chivalry.

Why would the Chivalry developers include this screenshot on the Steam store page showing terrible hand placement? It looks bad. Like amateurish bad.

Sounds a little pedantic. Do any games get this kind of thing right? And also support 64 player online melee? I hazard to guess that most compromises would be due to having to animate and model something that works in first person and for external observers/opponents.

Tom wrote on Feb 12, 2017, 18:13:Easy to blame the mayor here but Linux is a total failure as a desktop OS and there are strong fundamental reasons why that will never change.

(Windows is only a partial failure, firmly established as the least horrible option.)

-Maybe- that was true, right up until Microsoft spent a year proving that they consider your computer to be their property. No longer. They are now an active purveyor of malware, and are treated as such in this household.

You know, that's a fair opinion but still seems lauaghable to me. I wish they wouldn't do the analytics and spying and selling anonymised data or whatever it is they do with it and there is stuff that I miss from the older ones. But I think every other software or hardware product I use does it and older versions of Windows, OSX and Linux all seem less capable and more annoying to maintain than WIN10 when it comes to what I want to use the PC for. There are no platforms that do games as well and with as much software and hardware compatibility. For a reasonable premium people would prefer a less spyware choice but no such choice exists.

Maybe not doing the google information vacuum thing would leave MS further behind in the marketplace than they are already. I'm sure something like that would have been the justification. Or maybe the aliens are coming to annihilate us and the world elite are pushing for good human behaviour models so they can back us up somewhere.

I was off to work so took a gamble on pressing the 'Express install button' this morning, but that install, well, stalled so I reset the machine. Now I'm stuck on 16.12.1 and the update process says that's the latest. So I've either borked my drivers or they pulled the update.

Pretty happy with the 390x. I do miss the efficiency of the GTX's I used at work and previous computer but it runs Doom and BF1 like a dream at 1400p. Hopefully there are more GOOD DX12 and Vulkan implementations though.

LittleMe wrote on Dec 20, 2016, 18:51:Enjoying it yes but the rapid fire snipers and medics are far overpowered & imbalancing the game. Can a sniper in 1917 accurately fire long range at four shots a second? Medics dominate shotguns at medium range due to their rapid fire rate.

Everyone gets boutique/experimental/elite unit weapons that most people in this period never saw let alone got assigned. That's fun though. (There is a game mode with standard issue bolt action rifles but I haven't tried it yet) Most the maps are set during operations where some of these elite troops would have been present so it kind of works, but I wouldn't get hung up on it. It's probably about as realistic as battlefront.

Try Verdun if you want more realism (I think it is/was on special for about 10 bucks, last time I played plenty of servers to join). This is battlefield with WWI clothes on and it's a really good one of those. I'd argue that Medics are not primarily healers unless speced that way, they could have renamed that class. (Assault was healer in BF4 if I remember right). I love the mondragon optical personally.

Loadouts can modify your effective range but in general Assault is dominant at <25, Medics 25-75, Snipers at >75 (But at <125 can get counter-popped by medics depending on match up of guns). People way better than me seem to be able to break these rules though and good for them. Support seems to be a proper support, racking up sustained damage and assists at <100 and even helping much higher than that with suppression but I've played against a few that seem to mix it up with Assaults and do ok.

I am very suspicious of players that are able to head-shot with lewis guns from 200m but I only see that maybe one night a week if that. A lot of what seems like cheating is network compensation and kids that live BF and can walk up their bullets into your face while my calcified alcoholic old brain tries to comprehend what just happened. (My old man is a continent and 50ms further from our servers so sees more of the network nonsense).

That new map seems fine. The important thing is it's different to every other map, like all the shipping ones were. I think the maps are my favorite part of this BF. Each ones feels like a completely different game and they do ambiance better than most SP games. The consolised UI still needs work though, and the medal system should at the very least let you set a different target for each class, but they are all tiny annoyances that for us never really detract from the moment to moment fun, even when we are getting thrashed.